The Difference Between Branding and Marketing
BRANDING is your story. It’s what connects people to your unique and valuable services. Your difference has to be seen as better and relevant to your ideal audience
MARKETING is the strategy and delivery of that story and a process to attract, engage and influence these ideal prospects.
Watch Kirk in a brief video explaining how financial advisor marketing and branding complement each other.
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Branding Guide
The guide is a useful “How To” guide for moving forward and making the right lasting impression.
It contains elementary principles about the basic principles of branding: what a brand is, what it isn’t, how to create one and how to leverage your brand to increase referrals and attract more ideal clients.
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Why a Good Brand Matters
When you have a clear, simple and compelling story, it’s easy to refer you business. And when everything you do is of the same professional essence, you’ll move everyone to advocate for you.
When you have a good story, it’s much easier to sell or convince people to do business with you. Simply put, effective branding helps your bottom line.
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Brand Depth Checklist
The best opportunity to “stand-out” from the crowd these days is to showcase your brand versus simply talking about how good and different your firm is. In other words – Prove it!
This document contains a list of items to help build brand depth.
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30 Ways to be Different
For many advisors it’s a struggle to define their brand. This is a universal challenge for entrepreneurs. The good news is that it’s not as difficult to define your difference as you might think. When considering the ideas below, you’ll want to ask yourself these questions:
– Do I do this differently than my peers/competitors?
– Do I do this better than my peers/competitors?
– Do either of the above matter to my ideal audience?
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Brand Impact Assessment
The Brand Impact Assessment helps financial advisors and firms gain insights on the effectiveness of their branding and marketing strategies and implementation.
The worksheet walks you through your brand’s effectiveness across five categories:
| Who You Are | Brand Style | Brand Depth | Sharing Your Story | Expanding Your Vision |
Each of these categories will ask you specific questions relating to your brand.
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Nurturing Your Brand Using the Trust Framework
We’ve developed a framework for nurturing a brand; it’s nine integral and interdependent steps. Getting your brand message out there can be relatively simple if you follow a framework.
Without a framework, nurturing your brand can be unproductive and even chaotic.
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Your Financial Brand Style Guide
Your brand style guide is set of prescribed rules to follow whenever anything about you or your firm is created to ensure your audience sees and hears about you and your firm in a consistent, well defined way. Your brand style guide can range from a few pages just describing your logo and colors to a hundred pages with detailed explanations about sizes, fonts, typefaces, presentation in different mediums, imagery, texture, feel and even emotional connection to your brand.
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8 Brand Exploration Questions
Ask yourself these seven questions and challenge yourself to find your best answers, not necessarily the easy answers.
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30 Ways to be Different
30 ideas to ignite your thinking as to how or why you are different and better than your competitors.
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Brand Discovery Matrix
An exercise to help you brainstorm, assess and articulate your brand statement. This exercise covers the art and science of shaping your brand message.
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